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Monday, May 16, 2011

Excellent inside-the-box... fort thought

Oh welcome, welcome! Feel free to come in. Hold on one second, let me just reseal my door (rips off long strand of duct tape and places upon entryway).

Wait a minute, you didn't just walk into my home, you walked into my box fort! Wait a minute, you didn't just walk into my box fort, you walked into my home! That's right, they're one and the same!

Pictured here is an excellent "starter" box fort

Try not to be too jealous, but I am living the American dream. I live in a cardboard box. But it's not in the sad, down on my luck fashion. I choose to live in my box fort, because I have it as the interior chamber in my actual house. Really, it's a house within a house, and unlike when pre-adolesents do something like this, this is charming. Oh, and it also has a bed for friskiness. So it's charming and sexy.

So come on in, I'll give you the deluxe tour! Over there is where I fused a refrigerator box to a Sterilite storage container box. And if you'll just step over this homeless fellow, you'll see my flower garden, which I painfully constructed by mashing cardboard with flecks of my small intestine. It's not a very good garden—due to the lack of light penetration through my box home, oh, and the fact that small intestine doesn't grow—but it's charming nonetheless.

Make sure not to go that way, that's where I've engineered the first ever cardboard-box-fort-bottomless-pit. Were you to step into there, you'd never return. Or you might fall upwards of seven inches. Either way, you're pretty much screwed.

Yes, it's true. This house within a house just might be the most awesome thing ever imagined. The only problem is my cats constantly try to chew through it. Because, well, they're cats, and therefore they inexplicably like to chew on cardboard. However, I'm just a moat away from having complete and total ownership of my fort.

Many people wonder how I came to live inside this Box Fort Awesome. Well, believe it or not, it actually took some outside the box thinking. I realized there were numerous joys to box—everyone who was ever four knows this. In fact, when I was just days outside of the 4-year-old age range, to celebrate my fifth birthday, my brothers wrapped a refrigerator box and told me it was my present. Being a newly-minted-five-year-old and thinking bigger is always better, this struck me as greatest present ever created. I cracked it open and found... Styrofoam peanuts. But they assured me there was more inside.

My cat is my only family member who truly
understands my love of fort. He's also the
only one who eats it though.

After roughly 38 minutes of swimming around in Styrofoam, I found my actual present, a fun-sized piece of “Now and Later” candy. The actual present left much to be desired, but the presentation gave me a love of box and brought me to my present fort-based lifestyle.

I absolutely love my spiffy box fort setup. But I didn't write this post merely to brag. Instead, I want to help you live up to your fort dreams. Believe it or not, anyone can live inside a cardboard box. It is no longer the exclusive domain of hobos and vagrants.

To construct your box fort, it generally helps if you've recently moved. This allows you to have a whole lot of moving boxes and no furniture blocking the way of fort construction. However, if you haven't recently moved, dumpsters provide an excellent amount of cardboard, and you can view the obstacles presented by furniture as box fort terrain. Take the box and turn it on its side. That right there is successful box fort creation. If you want to be really randy, take another box and turn it on its side. You've just created a beautiful sun porch for your fort.

Henceforth, you can be creative, add all sorts of wings and secret passages. Craft chutes and ladders, create tunnels and chunnels and make an area devoted entirely to “Hungry Hungry Hippos.” Do any and everything possible to make the bitchingest fort ever. As they say, The sky is the limit,” but as we say in the box fort biz, “The 42-inches afforded by the most rotund of refrigerator boxes is the limit, which doesn't sound like much, but since the majority of people who will use a box fort are dwarfed by that astronomical height, in the grand scheme of things, it really doesn't matter.”

It's that catchy phrase that will allow your box fort dreams to become reality. I know it allowed mine to happen.